The Troogs
took one century to master the planet, then another three to
restock it with men, its once dominant but now conquered species.
Being hierarchical in temper, the Troogs segregated homo
insipiens into four castes between which there was no traffic
except that of bloodshed. The four castes derived from the Troog
experience of human beings.

The planet's
new masters had an intermittent sense of the absurd; Troog
laughter could shake a forest. Young Troogs first captured some
surviving children, then tamed them as "housemen," though to their
new pets the draughty Troog structures seemed far from house-like.
Pet-keeping spread. Whole zoos of children were reared on a bean
diet. For housemen, Troogs preferred children with brown or yellow
skins, finding them neater and cleaner than others; this
preference soon settled into an arbitrary custom. Themselves
hermaphrodite, the Troogs were fascinated by the spectacle of
marital couplings. Once their pets reached adolescence, they were
put in cages whose nesting boxes had glass walls. Troogs would
gaze in by the hour. Captivity—and this was an important
discovery—did not inhibit the little creatures from breeding, nor,
as was feared, did the sense of being watched turn the nursing
females to deeds of violence. Cannibalism was rare. Breeders, by
selecting partners, could soon produce strains with certain
comical features, such as cone-shaped breasts or cushion-shaped
rumps.

The practice
of keeping pets was fought by senior Troogs; the conservative
disapproved of innovations while the fastidious found it
objectionable when bean-fed humans passed malodorous wind. After
the innovation became too general to suppress, the Troog elders
hedged the practice with laws. No pet should be kept alive if it
fell sick, and since bronchitis was endemic, pets had short lives.
The young Troogs recognised the wisdom behind this rule for they
too disliked the sound of coughing. But in some cases they tried
to save an invalid favourite from the lethal chamber, or would
surrender it only after assurances that the sick were happier
dead.

Adaptability
had enabled the Troogs to survive their travels through time and
space; it helped them to a catholic approach to the food provided
by the planet, different as this was from their previous
nourishment. Within two generations they had become compulsive
carnivores. The realisation, derived from pet-keeping, that
captive men could breed, led to the establishment of batteries of
capons, the second and largest human caste. Capons were naturally
preferred when young, since their bones were supple; at this time
they fetched, as "eat-alls," the highest price for the lowest
weight. Those kept alive after childhood were lodged in small
cages maintained at a steady 22 degrees; the cage floors were
composed of rolling bars through which the filth fell into a
sluice. Capons were not permitted to see the sky or smell
unfiltered air. Experience proved that a warm pink glow kept them
docile and conduced to weight-gain. Females were in general
preferred to males and the eradication of the tongue (sold as a
separate delicacy) quietened the batteries.

The third
category—the ferocious hound-men—were treated even by the Troogs
with a certain caution; the barracks in which they were kennelled
were built as far as possible from the batteries lest the black
predators escape, break in and massacre hundreds. Bred for speed,
obedience and ruthlessness, they were underfed. Unleashed they
sped like greyhounds. Their unreliable tempers doomed the few
surreptitious efforts to employ them as pets. One night they kept
their quarters keening in rhythmic sound; next day, they slumped
in yellow-eyed sulks, stirring only to lunge at each other or at
their keepers' tentacles. None were kept alive after the age of
thirty. Those injured in the chase were slaughtered on the spot
and minced for the mess bowl.

Paradoxically, the swift hound-men depended for survival on the
quarry they despised and hunted: the fourth human caste, the caste
most hedged with laws.

The
persistence, long into the first Troog period, of lone nomadic
rebels, men and women who resisted from remote valleys and caves,
had perplexed the planet's rulers. Then they made an advantage out
of the setback. The wits and endurance of the defeated showed that
the Troogs had suppressed a menace of some mettle. This was a
compliment and Troogs, like the gods of fable, found praise
enjoyable. They decided to preserve a caste of the uncorralled.
This fourth caste, known as quarry-men or game, were protected
within limits and seasons. It was forbidden, for example, to hunt
pre-adolescents or pregnant females. All members of the caste
enjoyed a respite during eight months of each year. Only at the
five-yearly Nova Feast—the joyous commemoration of the greatest
escape in Troog history—were all rules abandoned: then the demand
for protein became overpowering.

Quarry-men
excited more interest in their masters than the three other castes
put together. On one level, gluttonous Troogs found their flesh
more appetising than that of capons. On another, academically
minded Troogs studied their behavior-patterns. Moralising Troogs
extolled their courage against hopeless odds to a Troog generation
inclined to be complacent about its power. The ruins which spiked
the planet were testimony to the rudimentary but numerous
civilisations which, over ten millennia, men had produced, from
the time when they first cultivated grains and domesticated
animals till their final achievement of an environment without
vegetation (except under glass) and with only synthetic protein.
Men, it was true, had never reached the stage where they could
rely on the telepathy that served the Troogs. But this was no
reason to despise them. Originally Troogs, too, had conversed
through sound hitting a tympanum; they had retained a hieroglyphic
system deep into their journey through time; indeed, their final
abandonment of what men called writing (and the Troogs "incising")
had been an indirect tribute to men: telepathic waves were harder
to decipher than symbols. It moved antiquarian Troogs to see that
some men still frequented the ruined repositories of written
knowledge; and though men never repaired these ancient libraries,
this did not argue that they had lost the constructional talents
of forbears who had built skyscrapers and pyramids. It showed
shrewd sense. To repair old buildings or build new ones would
attract the hound-men. Safety lay in dispersal. Libraries were a
place of danger for a quarry-man, known to the contemptuous
hound-men as a "book-roach." The courageous passion for the little
volumes in which great men had compressed their wisdom was admired
by Troogs. In their death throes quarry-men often clutched these
talismans.

It was
through a library that, in the fifth Troog century, the first
attempt was made to communicate between the species, the
conquerors and the conquered.

Curiosity was
a characteristic shared by both species. Quarry-men still debated
what the Troogs were and where they had come from. The first
generation had known them as Extra-Terrestrials, when Terra, man's
planet, was still the normative centre. Just as the natives of
central America had welcomed the Spaniards as gods till the stake
gave the notion of the godlike a satanic quality, millions of the
superstitious had identified the Troogs with angels. But Doomsday
was simply Troog's Day. The planet continued spinning, the sun
gave out its heat and the empty oceans rolled against their
shores. Living on an earth no longer theirs, quarry-men gazed at
the glittering laser beams and reflected light which made the
Troog-Halls and speculated about their tenants. A tradition
declared that the first space vehicles had glowed with strange
pictures. The Troogs, it was correctly deduced, had originally
conversed by means analogous to language but had discarded speech
in order to remain opaque, untappable. This encouraged some
would-be rebels. They saw in precaution signs of caution and in
caution proof of fallibility. A counter-attack might one day be
possible, through science or magic. Some cynics pretended to find
the Troogs a blessing. They quoted a long-dead writer who had
believed it was better for a man to die on his feet when not too
old. This was now the common human lot. Few quarry-men lived past
thirty and the diseases of the past, such as cardiac failure and
carcinoma, were all but unknown. But most men dreamed simply of a
longer and easier existence.

The first
human to be approached by a Troog was a short, stocky youth who
had survived his 'teens thanks to strong legs, a good wind and the
discovery of a cellar underneath one of the world's largest
libraries. Because of his enthusiasm for a poet of that name, this
book-roach was known to his group as "Blake." He had also studied
other idealists such as the Egyptian Akhenaten and the Russian
Tolstoy. These inspired him to speculate along the most hazardous
paths, in the direction, for example, of the precipice-question:
might not the Troogs have something akin to human consciousness,
or even conscience? If so, might man perhaps address his
conqueror? Against the backspace of an insentient universe one
consciousness should greet another. His friends, his woman,
laughed at the^notion. They had seen what the Troogs had done to
their species. Some men were bred to have protuberant eyes or
elongated necks; others were kept in kennels on insufficient
rations, and then, at the time of the Nova Feast or in the year's
open season, unleashed through urban ruins or surrounding savannah
to howl after their quarry—those related by blood and experience
to Blake and his fellows. "I shall never trust a Troog," said his
woman's brother, "even if he gives me a gold safe-conduct."

One Troog, as
much an exception among his species as Blake among his, read this
hopeful brain. It was still the closed season and some four months
before the quinquennial Nova Feast. Quarry-men still relaxed in
safety; the hounds sang or sulked; the Troogs had yet to prepare
the lights and sounds for their tumultuous celebrations. Each
morning Blake climbed to the Library. It was a long,
rubbish-encumbered place with aisles still occupied by books, once
arranged according to subject, but now higgledy-piggledy in dust
and dereliction, thrown down by earthquake or scattered in the
hunt. Each aisle had its attendant bust—Plato, Shakespeare,
Darwin, Marx—testifying to a regretted time when men, divided by
nationality, class or colour, suffered only from their fellows.

In the corner
watched by Shakespeare, Blake had his reading place. He had
restored the shelves to some order; he had dusted the table. This
May morning a Troog's fading odour made him tremble. A new object
stood on his table: a large rusty typewriter of the most ancient
model. In it was a sheet of paper.

Blake bent to
read.

Are you
ready to communicate question.

Blake typed
the single word: yes.

He did not
linger but retreated in mental confusion to the unintellec-tual
huddle round babies and potatoes which was his cellar. He half
feared that he had begun to go mad, or that some acquaintance was
playing him a trick. But few of his group read and no man could
duplicate the distinctive Troog smell.

The days that
followed constituted a continual seance between "his" Troog and
himself. Blake contributed little to the dialogue. His Troog
seemed anxious for a listener but little interested in what that
listener thought. Blake was an earphone, an admiring confessor.
Try as he feebly did, he got no response when he tried to evoke
his woman, his children.

"Trooghaft,
you are right," wrote the unseen communicator, attested each time
by his no longer frightening scent, "was noble once." Blake had
made no such suggestion. "The quality of being a Troog was
un-frictional as space and as tolerant as time. It has
become—almost human."

Then next
morning: "To copy the habits of lower creatures is to sink below
them. What is natural to carnivores is unnatural to us. We never
ate flesh before the Nova; nor on our journey. We adopted the
practice from reading the minds of lower creatures, then copying
them. Our corruption shows in new diseases; earlier than in the
past, older Troogs decompose. It shows in our characters. We
quarrel like our quarry. Our forms are not apt for ingesting so
much protein. Protein is what alcohol was to humans. It maddens;
it corrupts. Protein, not earth's climate, is paling our. . .."

Here there
was a day's gap before the typewriter produced, next morning, the
word complexion. And after it, metaphor. Blake had
learnt that the old Troog hieroglyphs were followed by
determinants, symbols showing, for example, whether the concept
rule meant tyranny or order. Complexion could only be used
metaphorically of faceless and largely gaseous creatures.

To one direct
question Blake obtained a direct answer: "How," he had typed, "did
you first turn against the idea of eating us?"

"My first
insight flashed at our last Nova Feast. Like everyone, I had been
programmed to revel. Stench of flesh filled every Troog-Hall. Amid
the spurt of music, the ancient greetings with which we flare
still, the coruscations, I passed a meat-shop where lights
pirouetted. I looked. I saw. Hanging from iron hooks—each pierced
a foot-palm—were twenty she-capons, what you call women. Each neck
was surrounded by a ruffle to hide the knife-cut; a tomato shut
each anus. I suddenly shuddered. Nearby, on a slab of marble,
smiled a row of jellied heads. Someone had dressed their
sugar-hair in the manner of your Roman empresses: 'Flavian Heads.'
A mass of piled up, tong-curled hair in front, behind a bun
encoiled by a marzipan fillet. I lowered myself and saw as though
for the first time great blocks of neutral-looking matter: 'Pate
of Burst Liver.' The owner of the shop was glad to explain. They
hold the woman down, then stuff nutriment through a V-shaped
funnel. The merchant was pleased by my close attention. He
displayed his Sucking Capons and Little Loves, as they call the
reproductive organs which half of you split creatures wear outside
your bodies."

"Was this," I
asked in sudden repugnance, "Trooghaft?"

Encouraged by
evidence of soul, Blake brought to the Troog's notice, from the
miscellaneous volumes on the shelves, quotations from his
favourite writers and narrative accounts of such actions as the
death of Socrates, the crucifixion of Jesus and the murder of Che
Guevara. Now in the mornings he found books and encyclopaedias
open on his table as well as typed pages. Sometimes Blake fancied
that there was more than one Troog smell; so perhaps his Troog was
converting others.

Each evening
Blake told Janine, his partner, of his exploits. She was at first
sceptical, then half-persuaded. This year she was not pregnant and
therefore could be hunted. For love of her children, the dangers
of the Nova season weighed on her spirits. Only her daughter was
Blake's; her son had been sired by Blake's friend, a fast-runner
who had sprained his ankle and fallen easy victim to the hounds
two years before. As the Nova Feast approached, the majority of
the quarry-men in the city began to leave for the mountains. Not
that valleys and caves were secure; but the mountains were vast
and the valleys remote one from another. The hound-men preferred
to hunt in the cities; concentrations of people made their game
easier.

Blake refused
to join them. Out of loyalty Janine stayed with him.

"I shall
build," the Troog had written, "a bridge between Trooghaft and
Humanity. The universe calls me to revive true Trooghaft. My
Troog-Hall shall become a sanctuary, not a shed of butchers."

Blake asked:
"Are you powerful? Can you make other Troogs follow your example?"

The Troog
answered: "I can at least do as your Akhenaten did."

Blake flushed
at the mention of his hero. Then added: "But Akhena-ten's
experiment lasted briefly. Men relapsed. May not Troogs do
likewise?" He longed for reassurance that his Troog was more than
a moral dilettante.

Instead of an
answer came a statement:

"We can never
be equals with homo insipiens. But we can accept our two
species as unequal productions of one universe. Men are small, but
that does not mean they cannot suffer. Not one tongueless woman
moves, upside-down, towards the throat-knife, without trembling. I
have seen this. I felt pity, metaphor. Our young Troogs
argue that fear gives flesh a quivering tenderness. I reject such
arguments. Why should a complex, if lowly, life—birth, youth,
growth to awareness—be sacrificed for one mealtime's
pleasure?"

Although
Blake recognised that his Troog was soliloquising, the arguments
pleased him. Convinced of their sincerity, Blake decided to trust
his Troog and remain where he was, not hide or run as on previous
occasions. There was a sewer leading from his refuge whose
remembered stench was horrible. He would stay in the cellar. On
the first day of the Nova Feast he climbed as usual to his corner
of the library. But today there was no paper in the typewriter.
Instead, books and encyclopaedias had been pulled from the shelves
and left open; they had nothing to do with poetry or the
philosophers and the stench was not that of his Troog. Sudden
unease seized him. Janine was alone with the children, her brother
having left to join the others in the mountains. He returned to
his cellar and, as his fear already predicted, found the children
alone, wailing in one corner. The elder, the boy, told the doleful
tale. Two hound-men had broken in and their mother had fled down
the disused sewer.

Blake
searched the sewer. It was empty. His one hope, as he too hid
there, lay in his Troog's intervention. But neither the next day
nor the day after, when he stole to the library, watching every
shadow lest it turn to a hound-man, was there any message. This
silence was atoned for on the third morning.

If we still
had a written language, I should publish a volume of confessions."
The message was remote, almost unrelated to Blake's anguish.

V

He read, "A
few fat-fumes blow away a resolution. It was thus, the evening of
the Nova Feast's beginning. Three Troog friends, metaphor,
came to my Hall where no flesh was burning, where instead I was
pondering these puny creatures to whom we cause such suffering.
'You cannot exile yourself from your group; Trooghaft is what
Troogs do together.' I resisted such blandishments. The lights and
sounds of the Nova were enough. I felt no craving for protein.
Their laughter at this caused the laser beams to buckle and the
lights to quiver. There entered four black hound-men dragging a
quarry-female, filthy from the chase, her hands bound behind her.
I was impassive. Housemen staggered under a great cauldron; they
fetched logs. They placed the cauldron on a tripod and filled it
with water; the logs were under it."

Blake shook
as he read. This was the moment for his Troog to incarnate pity
and save his woman.

"They now
unbound and stripped the female, then set her in the water. It was
cold and covered her skin with pimples.

"Again
laughter, again the trembling lights and the buckling lasers.

"We, too,
have been reading, brother. We have studied one of their ways of
cooking. Place the lobster—their name for a long extinct
sea-thing—in warm water. Bring the water gently to the boil.
The lobster will be lulled to sleep, not knowing it is to be
killed. Most experts account this the humane way of treating
lobster.

"The logs
under the cauldron gave a pleasant aroma as they started to
splutter. The female was not lulled. She tried to clamber out:
perhaps a reflex action. The hound-men placed an iron mesh over
the cauldron."

Blake saw
what he could not bear to see, heard the unhearable. The Troog's
confession was humble.

"The scent
was so persuasive. Try this piece,' they flashed, 'it is so
tender. It will harden your scruples.' I hesitated. Outside came
the noise of young Troogs whirling in the joy of satiety. A Nova
Feast comes only once in five years. I dipped my hand,
metaphor"—(even now the Troog pedantry was present)—"in the
cauldron. If one must eat protein, it is better to do so in a
civilised fashion. And as for the humanity, metaphor, of
eating protein—I should write Trooghaft—if we ate no capons, who
would bother to feed them? If we hunted no quarry, who would make
the game-laws or keep the hound-men? At least now they live, as we
do, for a season. And while they live, they are healthy. I must
stop. My stomach, metaphor, sits heavy as a mountain."

As Blake
turned in horror from the ancient typewriter, up from his line of
retreat, keening their happiest music, their white teeth flashing,
loped three lithe and ruthless hound-men. All around was the
squid-like odour of their master.